Meanwhile, Mr Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, said on Sunday that Israel's policy of settlement-building could undermine the new round of peace talks.

"Israel will be held accountable for the failure of the talks if settlement construction should continue," Mr Abbas said in a speech delivered in Jordan.

"The negotiations need to bring about serious action that will be able to bring liberation from the occupation and independence."

Mr Abbas said Palestinians understood Israel's need for security, but said that need should not be an "excuse to expand settlements and steal land".

In the statement responding to Rabbi Yosef's remarks, Mr Netanyahu's office said Israel intended to negotiate in good faith in Washington.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11127409

Five leading Israeli theatres were facing a mounting political row yesterday after a pledge by 60 of the country's most prominent actors, writers and directors to boycott the companies' planned performances in a Jewish West Bank settlement.

The companies triggered the protest by planning a programme of performances to mark the opening of a new £6.4m cultural centre in the West Bank settlement of Ariel later this year.

The protest – which was condemned by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – includes Yousef Sweid and Rami Heuberger, two of Israel's best known actors, as well as its most venerated living playwright, Joshua Sobol, whose Holocaust work Ghetto won the Evening Standard Play of the Year award when Nicolas Hytner directed it at London's National Theatre in 1989.

Their petition, sent to Israel's Likud Culture Minister, Limor Livnat, expressed "dismay" at the theatres' decision to perform in the settlement's new auditorium and served notice that the artists will refuse to perform in any settlements. Calling on Israeli theatres to "pursue their prolific activity" within the "green line" that marked its border until the 1967 Six Day War, it says that to do otherwise would "strengthen the settlement enterprise." .

As soon as it was published late last year, Torat Ha'Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book's contents as "230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew." According to the book's author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, "Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and should be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations." "If we kill a gentile who has inner or has violated one of the seven commandments... there is nothing wrong with the murder," Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults."

In January, Shapira was briefly detained by the Israeli police, while two leading rabbis who endorsed the book, Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef, were summoned to interrogations by the Shabak. However, the rabbis refused to appear at the interrogations, essentially thumbing their noses at the state and its laws. And the government did nothing. The episode raised grave questions about the willingness of the Israeli government to confront the ferociously racist swathe of the country's rabbinate. "Something like this has never happened before, even though it seems as if everything possible has already happened," Israeli commentator Yossi Sarid remarked with astonishment. "Two rabbis [were] summoned to a police investigation, and announc[ed] that they will not go. Even settlers are kind enough to turn up."

In response to the rabbis' public rebuke of the state's legal system, the Israeli Attorney General and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kept silent. Indeed, since the publication of Torat Ha'Melech, Netanyahu has strenuously avoided criticizing its contents or the author's leading supporters. Like so many prime ministers before him, he has been cowed into submission by Israel's religious nationalist community. But Netanyahu appears to be particularly impotent. His weakness stems from the fact that the religious nationalist right figures prominently in his governing coalition and comprises a substantial portion of his political base. For Netanyahu, a confrontation with the rabid rabbis could amount to political suicide, or could force him into an alliance with centrist forces who do not share his commitment to the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.

How to Kill Goyim and Influence People: Israeli Rabbis Defend Book's Shocking Religious Defense of Killing Non-Jews (with Video)

A singer who performed in front of a "mixed audience" of men and women was lashed 39 times to make him "repent," after a ruling by a self-described rabbinic court on Wednesday.

Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak, founder of the Shofar organization aimed at bringing Jews "back to religion" (hazara betshuva), has made it his recent mission to fight against musical performances for both men and women.

His "judicial panel," with Rabbi Ben Zion Mutsafi and another member, sentenced Erez Yechiel to 39 lashes in order to "rid him of his sins."

In a video clip of the court posted on the Shofar Web site, Ben Zion said that those who make others sin (mahtiei rabim), such as artists who make men and women attend performances or dance together, have no place in the world to come.

'Sinner' singer given 39 lashes by rabbis

The spiritual leader of Israel's powerful ultra-Orthodox political movement Shas has declared the Palestinians ''evil people who should perish from this earth''.

The inflammatory comments by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, whose Shas party is a member of Israel's ruling coalition, outraged Palestinian leaders but attracted only a mild rebuke from the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

During his Sabbath sermon last week, the 89-year-old rabbi, a former chief rabbi of Israel who is known for his rabble-rousing speeches, described the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Palestinian people as ''our enemies and haters''.

''All these evil people should perish from this earth ... God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians, evil-doers and Israel-haters,'' Rabbi Yosef said.

May the Palestinians perish, says leading rabbi

It's impossible to read the agenda for the Oval Office summit between Obama, Netanyahu and Abbas without laughing out loud at the absurdity of its pretensions. The American plan is that President Obama will inform Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, representing the Palestinian Authority, that this is make-or-break time for a peaceful settlement. The US wants an agreement within a year, with the stipulations in this agreement to be phased in over a decade.

At issue: illegal Jewish settlements, the status of East Jerusalem, the treatment of Palestinian refugees and final borders between Israel and a Palestinian state.

The man greeting Netanyahu and Abbas is no longer the icon of change who roused the world with his address to Muslims in Cairo and who tasked former US Senator George Mitchell with setting the stage for a just settlement of issues that have remained unsettled for more than half a century.

Obama is now in poor political shape. The economy is spiraling down, even as the midterm elections loom. Democrats face a possible bloodbath, in which they may lose at least one if not both houses in Congress. As the Israel Lobby knows well, the Democrats crave Jewish money and Jewish votes. When it comes to Israel's interests, the US Congress jumps to the Lobby's commands, and ignores Obama's.

Gone is any notion of twisting Netanyahu's arm, or trying to, as when the administration criticised one illegal Jewish settlement four months ago and when Vice President Biden relayed in Tel Aviv General Petraeus's concerns that Israel's obduracy was imperiling US security interests in the region.

The Lobby struck back, with political threats. With unusual frankness, Dana Milbanke of the Washington Post described Netanyahu's last visit to Washington thus:

"A blue-and-white Israeli flag hung from Blair House. Across Pennsylvania Avenue, the Stars and Stripes was in its usual place atop the White House. But to capture the real significance of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit with President Obama, White House officials might have instead flown the white flag of surrender."